Rostam is the biggest figure in the Shahnameh. For a thousand years he has been the one they send when there is nobody left to send. He comes from Zabol, out east, son of Zal. Not a court prince, and never really under anyone's thumb. He lives for centuries. He wears a coat of tiger skin. He is loyal to the crown and has never once been impressed by the man wearing it.

What keeps him worth retelling is not that he wins. It is that he is the only one who can be sent, he knows exactly what that is worth, and he goes anyway. Into Mazandaran. Into an argument with a king who is plainly in the wrong. Into the one fight in the poem that no reader wants him to win. He is the strongest man alive and the poem keeps handing him problems that strength is no use against.

He rides Rakhsh, who is half the reason he survives any of it.